For the first time since its release, the now-debunked “one in five women will be sexually assaulted while in college” statistic from the National Institute of Health’s Campus Sexual Assault Study has been disavowed by a high-ranking public official, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY).

According to the Washington Examinerearlier today, mention of the exorbitantly high “one in five” rate of sexual assault of women between the ages of 18 and 21 years was quietly removed from Gillibrand’s own Campus Accountability and Safety Act resources webpage. This removal occurred last week after the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that the actual rate of women experiencing sexual assaults while in college was closer to one in 41, not one in five.

Gillibrand’s webpage still links to a lesser known 2005 National Institute of Justice (NIJ) study, which in turn links to a 2000 NIJ study that uses a one-in-38 victimization rate derived by yet another contemporaneous study. However, the 2000 study, “The Sexual Victimization of College Women,” spuriously “projected” (see pp. 10-11) the results to come up with the “one in five” likelihood of a college-aged woman being raped during a five-year undergraduate academic career.

Also, Gillibrand still asserts on her resources webpage that college-going women are more likely to be sexually assaulted than their non-college-going counterparts—something the recent Bureau of Justice Statistics study also debunks.

In spite of the shortfalls of Gillibrand’s unofficial and unannounced revisions to her website, the Community for the Wrongly Accused (COTWA) lauded the move as a “Victory for the Truth” in a post published today on its website: “Sen. Gillibrand’s nod to reality is a good start. All persons of good will need to go on a full-scale offensive to discredit any reliance on the one-in-five statistic.”

COTWA pointed out the long list of “one in five” statistic critics, including the lead author of the one-in-five study, Christopher Krebs, who recently told Slate that “We don’t think one in five is a nationally representative statistic”; The Washington Post, which stated that the stat couldn’t be called representative; and The New York Times, which called the stat “flawed.” “As if none of that were enough,” added COTWA, to top off the list, “Scott Berkowitz, head of the national advocacy group RAINN [Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network], says the 1 in 5 stat ‘is probably too high.'”

Gillibrand and numerous other lawmakers—including President Obama and Joe Biden—have used the “one in five” statistic to justify legislative and administrative action to erode the rights of the accused in U.S. institutions of higher learning that receive Title IX funding. The most notable policy implemented, the now infamous “Dear Colleague” letter released in 2011 by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, has been criticized by many for its drastic reduction in the standard of evidence used to find the accused guilty. More recently, Gillibrand and fellow Senator Claire McCaskill (D-Missouri) have championed the Campus Accountability and Safety Act, which, among other things, will impose stiffer penalties for schools found in violation of Title IX policies.

In April of this year, the White House released a report by its very own Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault. In its final recommendations, the report states that recent recommendations by the Department of Education should extend into elementary and secondary education institutions.

Gillibrand’s distancing of herself from the National Institute of Health’s Campus Sexual Assault Study comes after several months of highly publicized and controversial claims of sexual assaults on college campuses that turned out to be false. Most recently, Rolling Stone published an article featuring the claims of a woman named “Jackie” who said she had been gang-raped at a fraternity house at the University of Virginia. The story has been widely discredited, and the magazine has faced harsh criticism in the press for what many have labeled irresponsible journalism.

Earlier this year, Brett Sokolow, the president of the Association of Title IX Administrators, expressed concern that there were a growing number of false rape accusations and that the new guidelines for dealing with sexual assaults on campus were “making Title IX litigants” of the accused.

Bob O'Hara is the U.S. News Director for A Voice for Men. He is a men's rights activist living in the Washington, D. C. area who has done work with S.A.V.E. and is the host of a weekly radio show with news and analysis on men's and boys' issues.

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Next, she will pull back on her push to unleash Yes Means Yes on the nation.

Jack Strawb

I wouldn’t count on it, but this move is cause for optimism. Iirc Gillibrand is likely to be one of the leaders in Congress pushing to move affirmative consent off campus.

I would have said there’s no chance ordinary men and women would allow the absurdity of affirmative consent to become the law of the land, but I also would have thought it was preposterous that Antioch’s sex codes of a decade ago written by radical feminists would become the norm at colleges throughout the U.S. I suppose i underestimated the hold feminism would have over academia and the difference in constituencies between academia and the general electorate. A lesson, I guess, that we should never underestimate what these madwomen and their enablers are capable of.

Bora Bosna

No, because she said in an interview “no matter how you measure it, there is too much rape”

Krolll

So, a (vice)president is allowed to lie about the occurence of rape? Or not?

Bryan Scandrett

He is. As the vice, he copies the lead of the pres.
It probably says something else in the rules if there are any for this but that is exactly what happened in practice. Repeatedly.

RevSpinnaker

That’s right, and “It’s Up To Us.”

Jack Strawb

It one can lie about WMDs in Iraq, rape statistics won’t be off limits. It’s utterly shameless bullshit on both sides.

Bryan Scandrett

I love the smell of winning in the morning.
Seems to me someone gives a toss what men, and the women who care about them, think.
Who’d of thunk it?
20% of the female population of the US, 10% of the total 319 million, or near as to 32 million people, factoring in the extra 7 odd million women.
The real question is how come no-one impeached the president already for not declaring martial law.
I would. Long before we sacrificed 32 million women.
Next question.
Dec, 22, 2014
The day the first member of the gov’t gets a clue. Hmmmmm? Or, alternativly, that’s the day she can no longer keep up this stupid charade to support the mob fraud of the organised crime she associates with?
Which is it?
First they laugh at you, then they fight you,….blah, blah.
This smells like a change in stages to me. I do like watching crumbling chunks fall from the walls of my prison.
I say we declare it a victory for all men, and the women who give a
rats. And raise our glasses in celebration. A red letter day.

billybob

“I do like watching crumbling chunks fall from the walls of my prison.”
I like that phrase.

(I hope to see the walls of mine tumble down,too…)

Tony Tang

Those who made up false statistics should pay for their lies.

anti feministpig

I have to agree with you Tony. I have heard this one in five statistic preached like the gospel. There are a lot of feminists that have a lot of explaining to do. An apology for intentionally spreading a bunch of lies would be a start.

RevSpinnaker

They don’t even lose their teaching jobs that paid for the phony research. Worse still they are hired as government consultants.

Tony Tang

Those who have power never admit their mistakes by themselves.The reason why feminists are exempt from criticism is that they have controlled government,meida,legal system,and education system.We need to kick them out.

menrppl2

Ah so the real epidemic on college campus’s is feminist lies and institutional man hatred

Elvick

It’s a start.

Paul Adams

Good start. Now let’s have them deal with all of the fallout and collateral damage that resulted from the policies put into place by that 1 in 5 statistic. How many young men were suspended, jailed, and/or put on some kind of sexual predator list (or even worse) because of a false accusation?

This is actually very significant and shrewd political strategy for a dyed-in-the-wool feminist Senator. She is not just distancing herself from the 1 in 5 BS, but she’s citing real statistics from the DOJ. This is a decisive move which anticipates the current anti-feminist sentiments of the public will continue to be galvanized by false accusations and the tiresome, empty-headed, loud-mouthed, shrill haranguing of privileged feminist college professors and their lily-white schoolgirl sycophants.

Avatar

I hope you are right .

Kimski

Oh, wow! They’re actually capable of adapting to a change in conditions?!
That’s the first time in so many years I’ve seen that.

Gilligan still pushes for Yes Means Yes.
She’s just ambitious enough to know that those embarrasing 1-in-5 stats will turn out to be a political anchor around her neck, and there’s no outswimming this one now. It has to go.

TefExpat

If the 1-in-5 persisted into creating more policies, it would have dragged the government deeper into dividing women and men. That stat enabled Title IX to be perverted by feminists and Obama knew there is no stopping them and their political shaming machine. So out rolls the DOJ to give the President a graceful way out, like “oops, here are some other numbers I did not know about when I spoke earlier” sort of way out.

Estwald

It is not unusual for feminists to back away from a hyperbolous claim once it has served its purpose.

Jack Strawb

Really? No offense, but can you cite even one example of a claim feminists backed away from?

Estwald

@Jack Straub

The statement is based purely on the basis my personal, anecdotal impression, backed by absolutely no evidence.

The clearest example was the “braless” movement. In the early 1970’s a commonly repeated feminist claim was that brasiers were invented by men to make women’s breasts more visible and thereby cater to men’s tastes. For a few years, many women, especially on college campuses, refrained from wearing brassiers in defiance of what they considered to be men’s expectations. Today one rarely sees braless women in public, and the claim that brasiers were invented to cater to men’s tastes is no longer made.

In the early 1970’s feminists were focused on the claim that all differences between the sexes were “social constructs;” no exceptions. Today, that particular claim is not asserted nearly as often or as absolutely as it once was and exceptions are allowed (only when those exceptions support feminists’ claims).

Around that same era feminists were equally as focused on a claim that rape has nothing to do with sex, ever. While such a claim is still voiced at times, it is much less of an absolute than it once was.

Gillibrand is now backing away from the “one in four” claim. It has served its purpose and there is no use wasting resources defending it.

As I state above, these are just personal observations.

Jack Strawb

You’re very clearly correct, and thanks for taking the time to clarify.

Given how long feminists have clung to the nonsensical “1 in 5” stat and that we actually heard the “77% pay gap” bs issuing this year from the White House, I think I was just startled to think feminists ever back away from anything, no matter how ridiculous, but of course you’re correct in the examples you mentioned. I’m sure there are more.

RevSpinnaker

That’s easy. “All men are potential rapists” was touted all over the media in the late 80’s. Even mainstream like Oprah. Since then feminists toned it down by saying that it’s source was a fictional character in Mary French’s book who said “all men are rapists, that’s all they are.” They don’t mention Brownmiller, McKinnon, Dworkin and Koss added the word “potential” and made it into the media sound byte that has come to be roundly criticized.

Jack Strawb

And it’s no coincidence that the “new” numbers, which we’ve known about for at least two decades, were only rolled out after the election.

RevSpinnaker

That’s because the truth hurt big time. And you’re right. The truth has been out there for going on a few decades. Old government statistics are being corroborated with new ones. The public is simply not believing feminist “research” (i.e. lies) anymore.

Jack Strawb

I don’t know that I’ll have the time, but I’d love to see a timeline of how the obvious falsehood of “1 in 5” came to be widely understood as such (which it still isn’t, quite). The process would be a lesson in debunking for the men’s rights movement and any other contending with blatant statistical lies.

Part of that process has to involve the truth getting picked up by a significant media outlet, which then gives other outlets the stones to run the piece. Another part would be a credible study giving very different numbers, as with the BJS-based study.

RevSpinnaker

Look up Mary Koss and her research for Ms. Magazine back in the 80’s. That’s where it all started. Same with the term “rape culture” which was first coined by a black man to define prison rape. It was immediately coopted by feminists and the issue of prison rape remains the fodder of late night comedy.

Jack Strawb

Oh, I know how “1 in 5” originated. That’s different from how it came to be understood then debunked by the wider culture. As for “rape culture,” do you have a link? Every other source I’ve seen attributes it to an eponymous 1975 film which does indeed discuss prison rape as part of rape culture, but a lot of it focuses on rape outside of prison. Thanks in advance.

Thanks for the link. I read somewhere the original authors felt feminists hijacked the issue and did little to help men. But considering the title of the original work it’s no wonder feminists seized on it.

Kind of misses the profound effects childhood trauma plays in creating rapists or any other criminal and social evil.

Regarding the concept of rape culture being debunked by the public at large, I think that’s happening right now. It’s history in the making. Feminists have been building the rape culture house of cards for 40 years now. It seems to be falling quickly right now.

How has rape culture been debunked? | The Rare and …
therareandferociousswamprabbit.tumblr.com/post/94473595036/how-has…

PlainOldTruth

One in one social constructionist ideologues practice statistics fraud (based on the faith in the notion that “the end justifies the means.”)

DukeLax

Gender-ideology, and turning hetero-relationships into a legal liability….is having long term societal consequences.

DukeLax

Imagine the day when guys who engage in hetero-relationships …get treated Equal under the law??? Imagine??? We can do it!!!!

Gerald Vrooman

The end in question is the hind end they pull their statistics from. 🙂

Avatar

Its a start .

anti feministpig

agreed avatar.., this is a start.., it’s a new beginning and definetly a step in the right direction

Reason

Can anyone tell me if even this 1-in-41 students figure is actually accurate? Depending on the survey method, serial-“victims” (ie, serial false accusers; eg [1]) can skew the numbers considerably, especially the per-student risk. The resulting statements of these studies tend to have little logical connection to the methodologies, allowing, say “1-in-41 students were raped” when the methods could only arrive at “1-in-41 students were at generalized risk of rape.” The method behind a stat is the most guarded secret of feminism.

Rape & sexual assault statistics are inherently noisy. Different people define the crimes themselves somewhat differently. Forensic evidence is often either lacking or indeterminate & over-reportage & under-reportage both muddy the waters. That said, the DoJ/BoJS data is probably a lot more reliable than anything one is likely to get from the Feminist Industrial Complex. I do think it’s a fair bet that despite what Sen. Gillibrand & “Criminal Minds” would like us to believe, wealthy college girls are considerably less at risk than the population as a whole.

Reason

“Rape & sexual assault statistics are inherently noisy”

Not as noisy as the people who tend to present them, then over-represent them. The 1-in-5 myth-ogas is more to do with promotion than imaginative statistics.

Cuivie

For once in my lifetime, I would love to see someone with a “study” producing some statistics on sexual violence give an error bound and justification for that. Like, in the physical sciences.

Somewhere between 1 in 1 and 1 in 10,000, lol.

Reason

Feminism: Three out of two studies prove men are bad.

DukeLax

Ive heard it was at least 5 out of 4 !!!

Jack Strawb

Most of the current noise, though, is the result of intentional obfuscation.

When sexual assault includes catcalling and forcible attempted kissing, the claim that “1 in 41 women will be raped or sexually assaulted while at college” is meaningless.

Graham Strouse

I don’t think the DoJ/BoJS data is intentionally obfuscatory. Traditionally they’ve been pretty honest. It’s just an inherently muddy process. And if nothing else they’ve put the kibosh on the 1-in-5 nonsense and the notion that rich college girls are somehow more at risk of being raped than, say, almost anyone else…

Jack Strawb

Fair enough. And, yes, if it puts “1 in 5” to death, that’s a lot.

john03063

it’s a moving target. Colleges don’t collect rape statistics anymore – they collect sexual assault statistics. And the definition of sexual assault changes from state to state and college to college. Colleges seem to have a propensity for ever expanding the conduct subject to sexual assault penalties (because they get more federal $$ if they crucify more men). If you take away all the bullshit conduct and concentrate on the stuff that really qualifies as rape or sexual assault, I bet the number is closer to 1 in 1000. And I recently read somewhere that college girls experience less than half of the assaults of their non-college sisters. I wonder when that information will make it to the halls of Congress?

T Skeelz

in the words of Dr. Evil: “rrrrrrrrrrrrriiiiiiiiight”, or another favorite quote from George Carlin: “narrow-minded, unenlightened, self-interest doesn’t impress me”

…cause that’s all I see. As others have pointed out, this is adaptation. In keeping with the basis of feminism, you will notice, there is no accountability here. She did it quietly, there will be no statements made, and definitely at NO point will she apologize or admit responsibility (well…unless it will serve as another manipulation).

DukeLax

Maybe this senator understands what is happening in the broader society…when society is being constantly fed a steady diet of faulty and inflammatory agit-prop….( now even federally funded manufactured statistics from law enforcement)…..that are turning hetero-sex into such a legal liability guys are going MGTOW…just to not be harassed by law enforcement.
Soon we are reaching the point in American society, where only the poor and un-educated males with nothing left to lose, ( nothing of any material value to lose)…….will risk a hetero-relationship….and American females are not going to like this new hetero-male underclass dynamic!!!

Andrejovich Dietrich

Well of course they wont like it. Because they only shack up with men richer than them. And want a nice escape plan for when they tire of competing in the real world.

RevPoindexter

This is a positive move in the right direction.

Karl Dawg

Runner on first, no outs, and Babe Ruth steps to the plate !

Divided Line

It doesn’t matter. 20 years from now, SJW’s will still be citing that statistic. Reality never penetrates their echo chamber. They’re little better than right wing religious conservatives in that way. If they feel it, it must be true, no matter what evidence or basic common sense tells them.

RevSpinnaker

You can lie to some of the people all of the time…

Avatar

I’m not trying to be negative but I have heard news like this 20 years ago and nothing has been changed , nothing . There are more single mothers in America than ever and they are doing a great job brainwashing their sons to be submissive . Women have no problem finding a sperm donor . They know there is an idiot ready and waiting around the corner .

RevSpinnaker

I agree, believe me. I was there 20+ years ago and can cite one big difference, the internet. There has not been a unified, yet wonderfully diverse, voice against feminism until now. They’ve seen the writing on the wall for the past decade and have become loud and desperately vindictive as their ideology is systematically pilloried, by men, women and now a democratic feminist Senator. And the mainstream press is finally coming around, albeit begrudgingly.
Apparently they see the writing on the wall too.

TrishRan

And why not? The claims of white slavery organizations kidnapping women into prostitution-slavery were discredited in the early 20th century, and yet people all over America believe these organizations not only exist but are flourishing.

Lastango

Gillibrand’s distancing of herself from the National Institute of Health’s Campus Sexual Assault Study comes after several months of highly publicized and controversial claims of sexual assaults on college campuses that turned out to be false.

Gillibrand’s distancing comes after the election proved the Democrats’ twin memes of Rape Culture and War on Women not only failed, but likely drove a wedge between themselves and key constituencies like white males.

Don’t take my word for it…. ask Amanda Marcotte:

64 percent of white men voted for Republicans. It’s the “widest GOP advantage in this group in data since 1984,” according to ABC News.

…Revenge of the white guys! There are two ways to interpret this news:
that the “war on women” narrative is no longer working for the
Democrats, or that the “war on women” isn’t just a Democratic campaign
slogan but a brutal fact of our modern political landscape. I lean
toward the latter: The Democrats got their asses handed to them by a
white male electorate that turned out in an effort to fight their
eroding cultural dominance.

…Conservative outlets spent the past few months really ramping up the
narrative of poor, put-upon white men who are under attack by women

…So conservative media inspired already conservative white men to feel
like they’re under attack, which in turn inspired them to show up for
this election…

“I have more psychological scars than you do!” – the pissing contest of the future.

itdarestospeak

It won’t matter that they lied – the policies are in place and that’s all that counts. She’s hoping to back away from the statistics after the fact once they’ve served their purpose
Kind of how the UK government used a couple of teens who died after getting drunk and then taking methedone ( the stuff used to help wean heroin addicts off smack) as one of the reasons for banning the legal high “mephedrone”
Once they had banned it, it was admitted that they had “confused” the two substances ( how convenient )
Mephedrone remains banned though

Octavian

So the reichstag wasn’t burnt down by communists? Oh well, they’ve already started putting them in camps.

Bop Smith

We need a conservative sweep like in 1980. I see way too much of the federal government butting in and causing more harm than good. A lot of this stuff just pushed by special interest groups whose interest is power and federal dollars based on manufactured or exaggerated problems.

Trevor Smith

1 in 5…..feminists will claim rape is rarely falsely alleged but there you have one of the largest false allegations ever made. every young man on a college or university campus is a rapist. Now they quietly back away from the largest false allegation made? and the white house jumps all over the stat with their report on campus rape, where biden asserts only women and girls can be rape victims on page 2 of the report. So where is the apology to the men who have been branded rapists, or to the boys and men who are rape victims themselves but ignored by the white house?

RevSpinnaker

This is an excellent link:

How has rape culture been debunked? | The Rare and …
therareandferociousswamprabbit.tumblr.com/post/94473595036/how-has…

Excerpt:

Feminism is supposed to be empowering, not to send us cowering.

Rape is not the “epidemic” that people are trying to claim it is. It has actually decreased dramatically in the past few decades – up to 80% since 1979, despite an increase in the willingness of victims to report them. This is even further supported by data directly from the U.S. Bureau of Justice.

The only thing that HAS been increasing are FALSE reports of rape, which do a lot more harm to the lives of others than you may want to believe.

Statistics doesn’t back up Rape culture

Men who are falsely accused of rape can have their names published and their lives ruined even if they are not convicted or charged – their accuser is protected and is likely to face no punishment, or a light one.

Under a recent federal directive, men are convicted of rape in university campuses if the investigating board finds that the chances they committed the rape are at 50.00001% or greater.

The DOE policy in practice: Caleb Warner was accused of rape and expelled from the University of North Dakota, then his accuser was charged with filing a false report. He remains expelled as of June 2011

Woman rapes boy, woman becomes pregnant, boy must paid child support.

40% of rapists are female 1

Definition of rape, erases victims of rape who are forced to penetrate, generally men who are forced to have sex with women.

Men are raped in the military

Men Outnumber Women Among American Rape Victims

Male statutory rape victims forced to pay child support

59% of the male rapists had been previously heterosexually molested.

Each of the above statements have links in the article.

atheist4thecause

These are the types of articles I come to A Voice For Men to read. We are seeing change in favor of the MRM all over, and if anybody thinks that Democrats are too far gone these types of actions by Democrats prove you wrong.

One problem the MRM has faced is that the issues tend to be more accepted by the right, who tends to put social issues on the back-burner in favor of economic issues, while the left prioritizes social issues but largely disagrees with the MRM. Part of this is due to the amount of money the left gets from feminism, but we need to recognize that neither the left nor right can afford to alienate men by ignoring men’s issues, so the more MRA’s speak up to both sides, the better chance we will have of getting things done. Neither side is too far gone.

john03063

This is good. Next step: let’s publish statistics about fake rape culture. How many college men are the subject of a false sexual assault claim? and how many of those accused are judged and punished without basic due process safeguards? I say 1 in 20 for the first statistic, and 19 in 20 for the second….

john03063

This is good. Next step: let’s publish statistics about fake rape culture. How many college men are the subject of a false sexual assault claim? and how many of those accused are judged and punished without basic due process safeguards? I say 1 in 20 for the first statistic, and 19 in 20 for the second….

Andrejovich Dietrich

You know the thing about a feminist, she’s got… lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll’s eye.

1 in 4 will be ignored in our lifetime

Labella52_110

What’s shocking to me, is hearing Obama spouting the “One in Five” nonsense. It begs the question: If he’s getting something like this wrong, what ELSE is he getting wrong?